Google Adds Malware Statistics to Transparency Report

Google strengthened its transparency report with malware statistics to raise security awareness and show how unsafe the Internet has become. Besides revealing national security requests from governments worldwide, the search giant`s report will also include figures on malware and phishing attacks.

“Our security team built Safe Browsing to identify unsafe websites and notify users and webmasters so they can protect themselves from harm,” Google said. “By providing details about the threats we detect and the warnings we show, we hope to shine some light on the state of web security and encourage safer web security practices.”

Google started to search for suspicious websites and block phishing attacks in 2006, and now flags over 10,000 malicious pages a day.

Almost one billion people use Google Safe Browsing, a technology that examines billions of URLs per day for unsafe websites. The search giant discovers thousands of new unsafe sites every day, including many legitimate websites that have been compromised.

“We want to make as much information available about the state of the Web as we see it, so everyone else cares about this problem,” Google Distinguished Engineer Niels Provos told The New York Times. “It`s a prevalent problem. It`s not rare. By putting this out there, we want to educate Web masters that this is very real, that the danger of you getting infected is very large.”

The transparency report is split by countries, and reveals the Internet Service Providers that host the most malicious websites. In addition, the figures show how long it took web masters to clean up their sites, and how quickly they got re-infected.